Remembering Sunday
by Amber Cartahall
Summary: The moon was white, echoed by the one emblazoned on his flask, and it was the only light in the sky – the stars were gone tonight. It was strange that he was surprised.   Songfic of Remembering Sunday by All Time Low.


_He woke up from dreaming and put on his shoes  
Started making his way past two in the morning  
He hasn't been sober for days_

He groans, his head spinning as he staggers out of whoever's bed he ended up in that night. He slips on his boots and quietly closes the front door behind him, making sure to leave no trace that he had ever been there. Wandering through the bleak streets of Neptune, he pulls a flask from his dark jacket. Black, like his past, future, and present. The moon was white, echoed by the one emblazoned on his flask, and it was the only light in the sky – the stars were gone tonight. It was strange that he was surprised.

_Leaning now into the breeze, remembering Sunday  
He falls to his knees, they had breakfast together  
But two eggs don't last like the feeling of what he needs_

He sits at the kitchen table, his head resting on the cheap wooden surface. A plate of chocolate chip cookies sit next to him where his grandmother has put them, but the china is the same as Lilly Kane had eaten off when she ate breakfast with him on Sunday, the day after they hooked up for the first time. His grandma had just sighed at him and made her some extra eggs. Lilly Kane had turned on the million-watt smile at her and devoured her breakfast, then led him outside and drove them to her house.

_Now this place seems familiar to him_  
_She pulled on his hand with a devilish grin  
She led him upstairs, she led him upstairs  
Left him dying to get in_

She had sneaked him in the back and pulled him upstairs, making sure the coast was clear before tugging him up into her room with a knowing smile on her face. He'd double-checked that Celeste was out and followed her, slipping his leather jacket off and leaving it lying over the back of a chair.

_Forgive me, I'm trying to find  
My calling, I'm calling at night  
I don't mean to be a bother, but have you seen this girl?  
She's been running through my dreams  
And it's driving me crazy, it seems  
I'm gonna ask her to marry me_

The first time Eli Navarro considers marrying Lilly Kane is at lunchtime on Monday, when he realizes her and Logan Echolls are still broken up – something about a girl and a kiss and a party. He stares at her over the quad, and when she notices him she gives him a small, secretive smile before turning back to Veronica Mars and continuing their conversation. When she hands him her pen on her way back to her seat at the back of the class he isn't really surprised to discover that half of it comes off in his hand and a little roll of paper drops out. _Meet me in the janitor's closet in ten minutes, _her handwriting scrawls across the note, and he grins involuntarily and asks the teacher if he can go to the nurse.

_And even though she doesn't believe in love  
He's determined to call her bluff  
Who could deny these butterflies?  
They're filling his gut_

The first time they really talk, they're sitting in the backseat of her car, having just finished with a heavy make-out session.

"Do you believe in love?" he asks, out of nowhere. She stifles a giggle into the back of her hand.

"Jesus, Eli, way to keep up the tough biker image." she snorts, rolling her eyes and flipping her hair in the way that would transform him into a puddle of goo if he'd been looking at her.

"Do you?" he presses her, undeterred by her sarcasm. She pauses, rather unnerved by his sincerity.

"No." she answers, no hesitations. "Not for a second." He nods slowly – he'd been expecting that – and looks down at her beautiful face, her mouth twisted in something that looks like pain. Before Eli can expand on the topic, she presses her lips to his and silently declares the subject closed.

And maybe when he mumbles something that sounds a little like an _I love you _into her mouth, she doesn't mind.

_Waking the neighbors, unfamiliar faces  
He pleads though he tries  
But he's only denied  
Now he's dying to get inside_

She looks beautiful, lying in the grass with her eyes closed, letting the sun fall across her face. He sits beside her silently, and she only realizes he's there when he shifts slightly and his shadow falls over her face. She cracks an eyelid open, then closes it again.

"You're blocking my tan."

"Sorry." He stands and moves to her other side. The sun washes over her, and her hair glistens in golden illumination, but somehow she still manages to make him freeze with every tiny movement, every flutter of her eyelashes - he lives, bleeds, _dies _for her and she doesn't even know.

Maybe he should tell her.

"Marry me."

"What?" She sits up, narrowing her eyes at him like he's playing some sick joke on her. Someone is, obviously, but it isn't him, never him.

"You heard me." He presses the ring into her palm, no little blue box, just simple, raw hope. He is saved from explaining further when the bell rings and he saunters off to class, shaking to his very core.

_Forgive me, I'm trying to find  
My calling, I'm calling at night  
I don't mean to be a bother, but have you seen this girl?  
She's been running through my dreams  
And it's driving me crazy, it seems  
I'm gonna ask her to marry me_

He's picking his grandmother up from the Echolls' house when he sees her. She's looking around secretively as she slips into the pool house, her hair shimmering in a wheat curtain around her.

"Oh loveeer," she calls seductively, and before he can react there's movement over his shoulder and Aaron Echolls is standing behind him.

"What do you want?" the movie-star asks, and Weevil (he hasn't been Eli for a few seconds now) blinks at him. Thankfully, Aaron seems to realize who he is and lets him through, nodding at Weevil's grandmother as she appears from behind the biker. "Well, don't steal the silver," is Mr Echolls' choice of typical white-trash tasteless joke, but Weevil barely acknowledges him and brushes out of the door, taking Mrs Navarro by the hand and helping her wordlessly into Chardo's stolen-parts truck.

_On a beachIn a stadiumAt a car wash_ not so far away, thunder crashes overhead and it begins to rain.

_There's a neighbor said, she moved away  
Funny how it rained all day  
I didn't think much of it then  
But it's starting to all make sense_

The drive home is silent, excluding his grandmother's questions about his well-being, which he ignores. This, obviously, only fuels more, and Weevil's beginning to wish he'd made Chardo pick her up instead. His cousin needs to learn his place anyway. He pulls up outside the home they call a house, and as he's about out lose his temper with his grandmother -

"Is this about Lilly Kane?" she asks softly. And then he's sobbing into her lap, now utterly thankful Chardo had other things to do. Letitia _shhh_'s him and strokes his shaking back, waiting until the last tear has soaked into her dress before letting him sit up and offering him a tissue. He accepts, then they both make a run for the house under Weevil's motorcycle jacket.

Much like Weevil, the sky was weeping for Lilly Kane.

_Oh, I can see now  
That all of these clouds are following me  
In my desperate endeavor  
To find my whoever, wherever she may be_

He doesn't go to her funeral.

It would look strange, and would raise questions and probably bruises from Mars and Echolls respectively – Duncan Kane's been out of it ever since she was found a few days ago. Instead, he sits in a tree and watches the procession, considering picking off all the people who never even talked to her with a rifle. He thinks of how much she would hate the sickly white lilies resting on the top of the oak box – he refuses to acknowledge it as a coffin – how out of her true friends, only Mars is crying, Kane and Echolls both staring ahead with different kinds of vacancy in their eyes. He realizes that Celeste's stony expression is marred by the tears running down her cheeks. Anything but the heart-wrenching sobs of Jake Kane and his daughter's name whispered under the breaths of many and the image of a bone-pale girl lying cocooned in a tasteful black dress, with red satin flowing out of the crater in her skull -

He drops down from the tree and flees into the forest.

* * *

_I'm not coming back, I've done something so terrible  
I'm terrified to speak but you'd expect that from me  
I'm mixed up, I'll be blunt  
Now the rain is just washing you out of my hair  
And out of my mind, keeping an eye on the world  
So many thousands of feet off the ground  
I'm over you now, I'm at home in the clouds  
Towering over your head_

On October 10, he opens his mail for the first time since the world ended – after some gentle nudging from his grandmother, and finds a small package concealed within a brown envelope. The postmark is October 3 and the return address...

Well, that prompts him to go and throw up, and this cycle repeats several times before he can bring himself to open the packet. There's a letter that he doesn't read because she's _dead_ and if he sees her scruffy handwriting again, he'll break down and he's the newly instated leader of a _fucking motorcycle gang._ That would mess up the natural order of things even beyond this apocalypse he's stuck in. So instead, Weevil drops the paper on the floor and kicks it under the bed, then forgets all about it. The tiny piece of Eli that is left puts it in his pocket for later. He goes to throw the envelope out, but a small diamond ring bounces onto his bedroom floor.

Maybe Lilly had cared, if only a little bit.

_Well I guess I'll go home now  
I guess I'll go home now  
I guess I'll go home now  
I guess I'll go home_


End file.
